Tony Stark is the uber-Engineer. He is worshiped by us engineers because that's exactly what most of us engineers think of ourselves. With money and no interference from the government weasels, we could permanently fix ALL of the world's problems, no sweat. Fark diplomacy, fark navel gazing about feelings and rights and cultural legitimacy and all that other crap. Build nukes for power, build dams for agriculture, build kick ass weapon systems and use them to exterminate bad guys once and for all, etc. If we could just get these goddamm Harvard/Yale/etc. policy wonks and their theories out of the farking way, we could get things DONE and SETTLED.

Step one: nuke the farkin' middle east into a glassified parking lot and put them out of our misery. Just do it. Those barbarians are a lost cause. NOTHING will be lost by removing them from existence. Nothing.

And then proceed from there. All of this planet's material issues are easily solvable once you get the goddam politicians out of the way. Energy is not a proble. Food is not a problem. Politicians trying to steer the bus are the problem.

Whether you are a conservative or a liberal, the type of person who thinks that the solution to all the world's problems is easy and that they alone see it, is the scariest and most dangerous type of person going.

Engineers have a statistically significant tendancy to be Fascists or Communists above the mean of every profession except for Physicians (even lawyers don't come close, possibly because they learn how falliable and stupid people are). Like the Professor in The Secret Agent, they think everybody else is a fool or a scoundrel and despise the masses of mankind for letting fools and scoundrels lead them.

They buy into conspiracy theories that even their technical expertise should easily show to be nonsense.

They believe that human problems and solutions can be reduced to the clear simple problems and solutions of engineering, mathematics, or the hard sciences. They are ignorant or dismissive the the humanities and arts. They despise religion and philosophy. They treat humans as things and "solve" them in terms of mechanics or physics.

They fail to realise that the world is far more chaotic and complex than their own narrow speciality. They fail to understand that the skills and aptitutudes of medicine, engineering, science or mathematics do not transfer readily to politics, sociology or psychology.

On the first day of classes at any university, some of the professors give the "we're not filling you with facts and numbers, we will teach you to think" speech. This is given to engineering classes and to humanity classes alike. Only the engineers are naive and dumb enough to believe it. That's one of several reasons why a study funded by a major bank and a major employer of engineers found that after 15 years at work, liberal arts students were better paid and had more responsible positions than students with Commerce or Engineering degrees. The other is that engineers and commerce students are really poor communicators and lack basic language skills.

I always say that the way to tell an engineer is smarter than his peers is that he is taking courses in English or History. The smart ones realize that they are missing something important, that there is something they need to become managers rather than just boobs in Sector 7G of the research and development department. The smart ones realize that they did not get the keys to the secrets of the Universe in their engineering or math classes.

The really really psychotic dumb ones (who may be extra-smart, of course) don't ever clue in. They think they can be engineers of human souls and lives. They are like Lucifer, the Second in Command of God, and the brightest thing in the sky after the Sun, proud in their ignorance of what it really takes to run the universe.

The Devil is an Ass, says the title of one of Ben Johnson's plays. Boy, is he ever! He thinks he knows better than God, who pulled order out of chaos and old night.

Human problems are intractible. They can not be solved with engineering. Trying to engineer people is one of the problems, not one of the solutions. Engineers are jack asses, especially computer software and hardware engineers. They can't write a manual for people who are ten times smarter than they are, and it takes ten times the wit and skill of that to write clearly and meaningfully for people who are dumber than you are, just as it takes a lot more time to write a five minute speech than a fifty minute speech.

Bugger off. Leave the human race alone. Just look at the damage that you've done with your engineering already. Soul-crushing machinery, buildings, civic plans, and political agendas that will be in Beta forever because they are complete and utter kludge and wouldn't work even if they were optimized because they are wrong-headed to start with.

A genuine conservative and a genuine liberal are brothers-in-arms next to an average engineer, much less a sociopathic one.

Take a look at a Brutalist building, a parking lot, or a shopping mall and remember that somebody once thought that would not only make life better for people, but make better people.

Consider that Frank Llyod Wright, a great architect was a very short man--and build buildings with ceilings that were comfortable for him. Bauhaus, Wagner, and all the pretentiousness and folly of dogmatic modernism had more to do with the Nazis than Darwin did. That's just a creationist nutter hatchet-job. It was German art and politics that did the harm, not subvervsive Jews or homosexuals or liberals or scientists.

Nietzsche managed to pass through Wagner and come out the other side. Insane, yes, but not stupid. His biotch sister married and Nazi and ran off to Argentina in the end, taking his reputation with her.

If you want to engineer human souls, you have to think on a Divine or geological scale. You can't do it in your lifetime, pissant. And even if you are Lucifer, fark you! God obviously had a reason to prefer humans to angels, because he made you angels bow down to us, not the other way round.

Man is not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath is made for Man. If only engineers and architects and other fools of that ilk would realize this and stop trying to fit us into their damn little boxes instead of outfitting us for life, the universe and everything like the poets, mystics, musicians and philosophers have tried to do.

It goes hand-in-hand with my other hypothesis that engineers aren't intelligent insomuch as they are skilled. They have been trained to problem solve a certain way, but not necessarily think critically about solving problems. So they are not good at figuring things out, they are good at figuring ONE thing out, usually whatever ties to their profession. So if all they know how to do is hammer, then they tend to solve every problem like its a nail.

mark12A:Step one: nuke the farkin' middle east into a glassified parking lot and put them out of our misery. Just do it. Those barbarians are a lost cause. NOTHING will be lost by removing them from existence. Nothing.

It's always been a pet theory of mine that all engineers are high-functioning autistics, or at the very least, have Aspergers.

There's a reason why the autistic philosophies of Libertarianism and Objectivism appeal to them so much. They have an almost completely sociopathic view of mankind.

Trocadero:Without Fail: mark12A: Tony Stark is the uber-Engineer. He is worshiped by us engineers because that's exactly what most of us engineers think of ourselves. With money and no interference from the government weasels, we could permanently fix ALL of the world's problems, no sweat. Fark diplomacy, fark navel gazing about feelings and rights and cultural legitimacy and all that other crap. Build nukes for power, build dams for agriculture, build kick ass weapon systems and use them to exterminate bad guys once and for all, etc. If we could just get these goddamm Harvard/Yale/etc. policy wonks and their theories out of the farking way, we could get things DONE and SETTLED.

Step one: nuke the farkin' middle east into a glassified parking lot and put them out of our misery. Just do it. Those barbarians are a lost cause. NOTHING will be lost by removing them from existence. Nothing.

And then proceed from there. All of this planet's material issues are easily solvable once you get the goddam politicians out of the way. Energy is not a proble. Food is not a problem. Politicians trying to steer the bus are the problem.

/whew//that felt good

This is why engineers have never been in charge. They are technically adept children.

Without Fail:mark12A: Tony Stark is the uber-Engineer. He is worshiped by us engineers because that's exactly what most of us engineers think of ourselves. With money and no interference from the government weasels, we could permanently fix ALL of the world's problems, no sweat. Fark diplomacy, fark navel gazing about feelings and rights and cultural legitimacy and all that other crap. Build nukes for power, build dams for agriculture, build kick ass weapon systems and use them to exterminate bad guys once and for all, etc. If we could just get these goddamm Harvard/Yale/etc. policy wonks and their theories out of the farking way, we could get things DONE and SETTLED.

Step one: nuke the farkin' middle east into a glassified parking lot and put them out of our misery. Just do it. Those barbarians are a lost cause. NOTHING will be lost by removing them from existence. Nothing.

And then proceed from there. All of this planet's material issues are easily solvable once you get the goddam politicians out of the way. Energy is not a proble. Food is not a problem. Politicians trying to steer the bus are the problem.

/whew//that felt good

This is why engineers have never been in charge. They are technically adept children.

mark12A:Tony Stark is the uber-Engineer. He is worshiped by us engineers because that's exactly what most of us engineers think of ourselves. With money and no interference from the government weasels, we could permanently fix ALL of the world's problems, no sweat. Fark diplomacy, fark navel gazing about feelings and rights and cultural legitimacy and all that other crap. Build nukes for power, build dams for agriculture, build kick ass weapon systems and use them to exterminate bad guys once and for all, etc. If we could just get these goddamm Harvard/Yale/etc. policy wonks and their theories out of the farking way, we could get things DONE and SETTLED.

Step one: nuke the farkin' middle east into a glassified parking lot and put them out of our misery. Just do it. Those barbarians are a lost cause. NOTHING will be lost by removing them from existence. Nothing.

And then proceed from there. All of this planet's material issues are easily solvable once you get the goddam politicians out of the way. Energy is not a proble. Food is not a problem. Politicians trying to steer the bus are the problem.

/whew//that felt good

This is why engineers have never been in charge. They are technically adept children.

Bashar and Asma's Infinite Playlist:Any patriotic hero like Captain America just isn't exciting anymore, because innate in his character is the implication that non-American lives are less valuable than American ones. It's this weird American exceptionalism that is increasingly less and less relevant.

I disagree, even as a non-American. His film flagrantly discarded the "rah-rah" jingoism that he was born in and portrayed it for the propaganda piece it always was, and it's now an inherent part of his character. Cap actually took a stand against that stuff; that's the turning point in his film, when he starts making his own choices to be a hero.

The character was "born" in the WWII propaganda era, essentially. He was the embodiment of the American ideal. And that's exactly how they chose to use him today, and if they don't want to cheapen it, it's going to remain his focus; he isthe American ideal, of a different America than the one he lives in today. He's a man out of time, but he harks back to all the better things of that earlier era.

He's a great character because of this, and it's why he ends up as the leader of the Avengers. Not because he's stronger than the others. Not because he's smarter. Because he's a better man, and they know it. That's why he asked the "take away the suit and who are you?" in the Avengers. He wasn't asking about power. He was asking about character. That he'd ask is perfect for him, and Stark's response is perfect. Not because it's 'right', but because it lays out the difference between the two; Cap is all about heart, Stark is all about being rich and famous. Which is also why Stark, in the comics, had his bout with alcoholism; he's a flawed man, at heart. Thor has superiority issues and underestimates mortals, and can be overly violent. Hulk is just a raging smash machine. They're all flawed. Cap really isn't.

And now he's stuck in a world where flaws are vaunted as virtues. That's the point of his exchange with Stark. And it's why he's still an interesting character.

Out of three first movies for the characters listed (Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America), I think Iron Man was the best. This is thanks to RD,Jr., good writing, and the lack of a romance subplot being shoehorned into the middle of everything needlessly. Yes, it was there, but it was minor and did not distract much.

Captain America was awesome in the way that they subverted the whole concept, having him stuck selling war bonds for half the movie. The execution of the movie concept did not worship the hero needlessly.

Thor was, I must say, vastly better than I thought it would be. Chris Hemsworth was just lunky and egotistical enough, Tom Hiddleston was by far the best villain I've seen in a long time, Stringer Bell did a great job guarding the bridge, and everyone else was fantastic...except for Natalie Portman. Please, Natalie, hurry up and die, and quit ruining movies with your 'acting'. Your two facial expressions ("stupid and amused" and "constipated") are both painful to watch. Her aside, the comic timing in some of the scenes was perfect, e.g. when they back over Thor just after the research assistant cocks her TASER. Also, it was directed by Kenneth Branagh, for crying out loud.

Any patriotic hero like Captain America just isn't exciting anymore, because innate in his character is the implication that non-American lives are less valuable than American ones. It's this weird American exceptionalism that is increasingly less and less relevant.